John Updike Quotes

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrif...

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming p...

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable...

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it al...

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by t...

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of ru...

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a super...

We are most alive when we're in love.

Gutenberg (hesitantly): Perhaps the book, like God, is an idea some men will cling to. The revolutio...

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the peop...

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the mois...

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the...

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the huma...

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The ...

No matter how cheerful and blameless the day’s activities have been, when you wake in the middle of ...

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the s...

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forget...

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It ...

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not h...

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, ki...

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a...

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky wa...

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So t...

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

Sex is like money only too much is enough.

The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichev...

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held...

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly pu...

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's p...

One of the cool chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty...

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant of a teacher and a learner.

She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing...

Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell ...

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are s...

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudice...

The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to ou...

Humor is my default mode.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another ...

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write...

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be ...

My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist ...

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15,...

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open se...

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and...

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

A morning later, Nancy described her first dream, the first remembered dream of her life. She and Ju...

No act is so private it does not seek applause.

I never heard enough damnation from your pulpit. Many mornings I had to strain to take hold of what ...

In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse ...

The brontosaurus had thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. ...

Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, t...

Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flour...

It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of y...

Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider ...

He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people...

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a ...

He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he ...

The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here...

As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that t...

Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who ...

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.

Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting...

Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what ...

Growth is betrayal.

Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving some...

What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and th...

TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by ...

Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roof...

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through...

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t—whichever...

The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking...

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His...

They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a sta...

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He...

Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we ...

The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith tha...

The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and bec...

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical...

Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressin...

Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restr...